The thinking and imagination of intellectuals and popular movements from around the world were greatly impacted by the Argentine rebellion of December 2001, especially in Latin America. During the 1990s, Argentina was presented as an exciting experimental laboratory for neoliberalism, where, in actuality, one of the strongest of the so-called “welfare states” established on the continent was rapidly and ferociously dismantled. It was a dismantling that converted a broad system of organisms of public assistance, social security, and state enterprises into a state reduced to its most minimal of expressions.

While this panorama provoked a regime of accumulation that produced a critical clash of intersecting economic, political, social, and cultural forces, no popular organization or movement proposing fundamental changes to the social and economic structures of Argentina could take advantage of this scenario. And while it is also true that the insurrection helped put the brakes on the inexorable journey to ruin that the old Argentina was on, it did not, nor did it know how to, lay the foundations for constructing a new society. Now, more than four years after those events, a new government that originates from the same sectors that formed part of the power structures of the 1990s (granted, a secondary part) still continues to demonstrate the inheritance of those days even within the new limits it is bound up in. That is, even though the new hierarchical power-base has succeeded in notably disabling the force of earlier social mobilizations, it operates within the limits sketched out by those earlier social mobilizations when necessity and public opinion demands it to not return to the visible symbols of neoliberalism.

The social phenomenon that we have been succinctly discussing thus far (one that, of course, deserves a much more profound analysis than space permits here) gave visibility to the real consequences of the neoliberal political model within a dependent country and, as such, showed the weaknesses of this model. At the same time, it permitted the vast tapestry of organizations and popular experiences to expose through its threads the light that emanated from the Argentine mobilization of 2002. In this way, popular assemblies, unemployed workers’ movements, barter clubs, cooperatives, and other expressions of popular movements organized because of the political and economic defenselessness of society, emboldened as they were, placed themselves within the national and international publics’ consideration. One of these popular expressions has become the centre of much discourse the world over: the recovered factories and enterprises that were occupied by workers in light of owner abandonment or fraudulent bankruptcies and put back into production by workers under the rubric of workers’ cooperatives or some other form of self-management.

In a conversation with technocrats of the Inter-American Development Bank (IBD) who were setting up a proposal for rotating funds for ERTs in mid-2003, some of us from the investigative team at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the UBA were surprised when they told us that “Washington” had rejected the term “recuperado” (recovered), preferring the term “self-managed” enterprise. That is, self-management does not seem to scare technocrats of international financial organisms, but recovery does. This is due to the fact that self-management, understood as cooperativism or the social economy – “the economy of the poor” – does not bother big business and the dynamics of entrenched capitalism. But to “recover” a firm, with the appropriation of a once capitalist enterprise by simple workers, is another matter.

Tostartwith,wearelookingataphenomenonthatisfoundthroughoutArgentinaandinnumerous industrialandservicesectors.ThedistributionofERTswithinthecountry’sregionsandindustrial sectorsisnotrandombuthasatightrelationwithcountry’seconomicstructureandwiththehardesthit sectorsoftheneoliberaloffensiveofthe1990s.Thisisreflectedinthefactthat60%of ERTsare clusteredwithinmetropolitanBuenosAiresandthemajorityoftheERTsintheinteriorofthecountry areconcentratedinthemostindustrializedareasoftheprovincesofSantaFe andCórdoba.Fifty percentofERTsbelongtometallurgicalindustriesorothermanufacturingindustries,18%fall intothe foodssector,and15%tonon-industrialservicesectorssuchashealth,education,and lodging.Only 12%of ERTs correspond to enterprises that were founded after 1990; indeed, a high percentage (65%) had plants in operation before 1970, the great era of Argentine industry.

rightsthatothermembersofthecooperativeenjoy;andsoon.Sometimes,theseasymmetricalpractices arewrittenintothecooperative’sstatutes,actingasprecautionarymeasuresthatare consciouslytaken beforeacceptingnewworkersintothecooperativeasfullmembers.Atother times, these same practices serve as steps towards creating a collective of employers, simultaneously driven by the fear of losing their much-struggled-for jobs while also being stamped with the mark of exploitation. These are some of the problems that ERTs currently face, two to three years or so after the period where it seemed that each week one or two plants were being taken by their workers as they struggled to convert them into recovered enterprises. The present period in the history of ERTs in Argentina is marked more by quotidian struggles than by political struggle. Once workers’ control of the enterprise is obtained, most affinities with organizations of solidarity that lie beyond the walls of the plant, be they with neighbours or other social movements or even other ERTs, takes on secondary importance.